Stefan Schmid on "Networks in the Disco: Algorithms for Demand-Aware and Self-Adjusting Networks"

Title: Networks in the Disco: Algorithms for Demand-Aware and Self-Adjusting Networks

Speaker: Stefan Schmid

Time and Place: Tuesday, 16th of October 2018, 10:15 am, room 310

Abstract:

The physical topology is emerging as the next frontier in an ongoingeffort to render communication networks more flexible. While firstempirical results indicate that these flexibilities can be exploited toreconfigure and optimize the network toward the workload it serves and,e.g., providing the same bandwidth at lower infrastructure cost, onlylittle is known today about the fundamental algorithmic problems underlying the design of reconfigurable networks. In this talk, I argue that self-adjusting networks should be seen through the lense of coding theory and self-adjusting datastructures. I demonstrate, by examples, the inherent advantage of demand-aware networks over state-of-the-art demand-oblivious, fixed networks (such as expanders). I then present entropy-based lower bounds, as well as asymptotically optimal (polynomial-time) algorithms for different workloads.The talk is based on our DISC 2017 and SIGCOMM CCR 2018 papers.

Short bio:

Stefan Schmid is a Full Professor at the University of Vienna, Austria.MSc and PhD at ETH Zurich (Prof. Roger Wattenhofer), Postdoc at TU Munich (Prof. Christian Scheideler), Senior Research Scientist at T-Labs in Berlin, and Associate Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark.Stefan Schmid received the IEEE Communications Society ITC Early CareerAward 2016.